Traditionally, academic freedom has been understood as an individual right and a negative liberty. As William Tierney and Vincente Lechuga explain, "Academic freedom, although an institutional concept, was vested in the individual professor." The touchstone document on academic freedom, the American Association of University Professor's (AAUP) 1940 "Statement," sought "to insure that an individual's ability to conduct teaching and research without interference would not be violated" by either the institution or the state. Although any attack on academic freedom was understood to be "tantamount to an attack on the academy itself," sanctions imposed on individual faculty members marked both the visible register and recognized point of purchase for restrictions on academic freedom. At the turn of the 20th century, the archetypal instance of infringement was "when a professor said something pertaining to his or her academic specialty, someone became upset, and that [professor] was fired." The author follows Tierney and Lechuga in calling this the "traditional framework" for conceiving academic freedom. In this article, the author calls for a more expansive definition of academic freedom--and a union contract to protect it. (Contains 20 endnotes.)